The latestAstral Chaindeveloper’s blog stars Takuo Yamamoto,visual effects artistat PlatinumGames. According to Yamamato, his job is to make it “immediately visually clear what the player did and what happened as a result. Visual effects (VFX) are purely visual, but they still have a huge impact on how it feels to control a character, or interact with stage mechanics.”
The visual effects for combat have to be strong yet easy to understand. And of course in this case must maintain that trademark Platinum flashiness. In other words, it has to possess what he calls “interactive exhilaration.”
Yamamoto details how VFX is applied to Chimera deaths:
InAstral Chain, we’ve followed the tried-and-true Platinum tradition of having the enemy stop moving the instant they’re defeated, then vividly burst, so the player knows they’re done for. This is important because combat is fast-paced and players will often face several enemies at once! Nobody wants to waste time beating a dead chimera.
…we wanted the enemies to burst apart into particles in real-time when they were defeated….To briefly explain the process, in the moment a chimera dies, we enlist the help of the GPU to cover it in particles that match the color of the chimera under them. Since the chimeras inAstral Chainare made up of data, we made these particles into appropriately digital-looking shiny cubes. Just having chimeras crumble into a pile of cubes wouldn’t have enough visual impact for an action game, so we made some of them fall, while others violently scatter into the air, then tweaked the effect until it felt just right.
Next he goes into the effects used for Dimensional Cracks:
This is a visual effect used quite frequently inAstral Chainto show how chimeras warp and damage the world around them. This effect makes use of a technique called parallax mapping to make it look as if attacks or other damage are actually making dents in the scenery. That’s right – this is done with visual effects, not through a change in the 3D models themselves. Which means it can be used pretty much anywhere! We even stuck this effect on some enemy character models to make them look like cracks between dimensions were opening up all over their bodies.
And finally he talks about the in-game augmented reality tool called IRIS, which helps the protagonist with their police work. When the IRIS is activated, several effects take place at once:
As always, it’s truly fascinating to find out what kind of hard work and dedication goes into creating titles like these. Especially in terms of creating and developing these smaller mechanics that players normally don’t consider during their average playthrough.
There’s also several previous developer blogs that delve deeper into the title from thesound designtoart directiontothe musictothe environmentsthemselves.
Astral Chainreceived some lovelypost-launch artworkfrom both theNieR:AutomataandBayonetta’s character designers. The officialPlatinumGames Twitteraccount also released new art from thestudio’s main artistHajime Kimura, celebrating the title’s success.
Astral Chainlaunched exclusively for Nintendo Switch and you can order it right now onAmazon. If you need some more convincing before you do, check out our review of the gamehere.
